We recently covered how to resolve an issue when Mac OS X doesn’t remember a wireless network, password protected or not, and since then several readers have notified us of another separate issue: Mac OS X won’t remember a wireless network password. The networks are remembered, but each time the network is found the password is forgotten and has to be reentered. This annoyance is fairly easy to resolve, as shown below.

Using Keychain First Aid

1. Hit Command+Spacebar to bring up Spotlight, launch “Keychain Access”
2. Pull down the “Keychain Access” menu and select “Keychain First Aid”
3. Enter the password accompanying the given user name



4. Check “Repair” and click on “Start”

Sometimes repairing the keychain can be enough to resolve issues with passwords being remembered by OS X, but if not carry on with a solution that definitely works below:

Remove Wireless Networks from Keychain

1. Hit Command+Spacebar for Spotlight and search for “Keychain Access”, launch the app
2. Using Keychain Access search box in the upper right corner, search for “Airport network password”



3. Locate and select the name of the problematic router, if there are multiple entries for a single router select them all
4. Right-click on the router name and choose “Delete RouterName”



5. Authenticate the removal, then close out of Keychain Access
6. Reboot the Mac and re-join the wireless network

Mac OS X should now remember the wifi password without incident.

If you’re having broader problems with Mac OS X Wi-Fi where it doesn’t work at all or doesn’t work after waking from sleep, try the above methods in combination with removing the network and renewing the DHCP lease.

If you’re still out of luck, don’t miss our guide on fixing wi-fi problems in OS X Lion.

iOS has an optional system wide zoom ability accessible by a gesture, much like OS X’s zoom feature. This allows any iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch user to zoom into elements or text on screen, making them much larger and easier to read, interpret, or access.

To use the extra zoom gestures on an iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch, first you’ll need to enable Zoom in iOS. Here is how to do that in all versions of system software.

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Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard users can now add OS X Lion’s iOS-style Launchpad feature to their desktops with a free third party utility called MacLaunchPad.

MacLaunchPad is pretty similar to the real thing, and some features are closer to the version of Launchpad that appears in OS X Mountain Lion, like the real-time app search function. You can set some customizations that don’t exist in the Lion version too, like giving you the ability to change the amount of visible icons per Launchpad page. As usual with Launchpad, you can set hot keys to activate and deactivate the app, or even arrange and uninstall apps directly from the panels.

• Get MacLaunchPad free from SourceForge

MacLaunchpad is compatible with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and Mac OS X 10.5.8 Leopard.

Adding colorized ls output to the Terminal in Mac OS X is a good way to make navigating around the command line a bit easier on the eyes. This makes different items show up in different colors, including directories, files, executables, and symbolic links.

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Want to see more of an email than the default two lines of body text? Don’t want to see any preview of email contents, other than the subject of a message? If you’re not happy with the default setting, you can change the line count of mail previews within iOS easily:

1. Tap on “Settings”
2. Tap “Mail, Contacts, Calendars”
3. Under the “Mail” subheader, tap on “Preview”
4. Select a preview length, ranging from no preview to 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 lines of body text

Double-tap the Home button and switch between Settings and Mail to get a quick visual of how the change will look.

These settings will be the same on iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch, although how good each setting looks varies per device, with the larger previews fitting best on iPad and the smaller 1-3 line previews working better for the smaller screened iPhone and iPod.

VLC 2.0 has been released, the powerful video playing apps new version supports even more video and audio formats and includes limited Blu-Ray playback, in addition to providing under-the-hood improvements for faster decoding with multi-core CPU’s and GPU’s.

• Download VLC 2.0 from VideoLan.org

If you’re unfamiliar with VLC or you don’t have it yet, you should add it to your app repertoire. VLC can open and play just about every conceivable video and audio file format thrown at it, making the days of hunting for appropriate codecs long gone. Furthermore, if the media in question is an obscure format, you can use VLC to transcode it to a more widely compatible format, from MPEG, DIVX, H.264, WMV, and more. It’ll often even open corrupted or partially downloaded movie files when many other apps fail to do so. The other benefit is that VLC is cross platform compatible, allowing you to use the same app on Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux, all available as free downloads.

VLC 2 also brings an all new interface to the app, which looks like a combination of iTunes and Windows Explorer and winds up making it more of a media manager app than just a simple movie player. If you don’t want to use it for managing any files though you can still drag and drop media onto the app to play it as usual.

Make OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion‘s new Notification Center feature instantly more useful by grabbing Hiss, a free application that sends apps Growl notifications directly to Mountain Lion’s desktop notification panel.

There’s not much more to the app than that, but nonetheless it’s a great utility and worth downloading for those who are using the OS X 10.8 Developer Preview. Right now there simply aren’t that many apps that have Notification Center support tied in, although this will certainly change as we approach the Summer release date. Also, it’s worth keeping in mind that chances are reasonably high that Growl itself will end up tying similar functionality into future releases of their apps, but Hiss should bridge the gap for now.

• Download Hiss for free from the developer Connect3

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New versions of Mac OS X include the Versions feature and Auto-Save ability, this lets users restore back to previous editions of a file by creating a constant sequence of saved file states while they are being worked on.

All around, Versions and auto-save are useful, but they can also leave traces of sensitive documents and files you may not wish to keep around. Other than the privacy implications, this same technique can resolve some erroneous behavior with Versions as well. The simplest solution to these issues is to manually delete the Versions saved states cache directory.

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Included below are new simple instructions for uninstalling modern versions of Xcode. Deleting old versions of Xcode is covered as well, this is a thorough guide to uninstall Xcode from any Mac regardless of version and Mac OS X release.

Xcode is Apple’s developer suite for iOS and Mac OS X, it’s necessary if you intend to be write apps for either OS and installing it includes a number of other useful utilities other than the main IDE itself. The additional aspects include things like the Interface Builder, iPhone Simulator, Quartz Composer, Dashcode, gcc, dtrace, perl, python, ruby, and much more that has use beyond core iOS and Mac OS X development, adding valuable utilities to tweakers and administrators toolkits.

Installing Xcode is just a matter of downloading it from the Mac App Store, but what if you want to remove Xcode?

How to delete Xcode depends on what version you are trying to remove from the Mac. We’ll cover removing newer versions of Xcode first, then cover deleting the older versions of the app as well.
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OS X Mountain Lion is Apple’s latest Mac operating system that is complete with a bunch of new features that iOS users will find familiar. It’s looking like a great addition to the Mac OS family, but for the time being it’s still in Developer Preview, has a fair amount of bugs, and isn’t quite ready for prime time. For those who want to explore and develop for OS X Mountain Lion without losing their primary – and stable – OS X Lion installation, the best thing to do is create a dual boot set up. This lets you have both Mac OS X 10.7 and OS X 10.8 on the same Mac, which you can easily switch between with a reboot.

Before beginning, do the following:

• Check system requirements to insure OS X Mountain Lion compatibility
• Download OS X Mountain Lion from the App Store
• Back up the Mac within OS X Lion using Time Machine

If you already made an OS X Mountain Lion boot installer, you can use that, or you can partition directly from Disk Utility in Lion. It shouldn’t matter although OS X Lion can be pickier with partitioning the boot drive than prior versions of Mac OS X. After you have backed up your Mac, you can proceed.

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A little-known feature of iMessage lets any Mac send files to another iMessage user (or yourself) using an iOS device, and vice versa. Yes, this means iMessages can function as a full-fledged file transfer app for both Mac OS and iOS users, providing for simple transferring of files, pdf’s, text and rtf documents, movies, pictures, and just about anything else.

To use this awesome feature, you will need to be sure to have iMessage set up in iOS and/or the Messages for Mac client as well. Having both lets you send files between yourself and your Apple devices, but if you only have a Mac or an iOS device then you can still send files to other users through the messages apps. Once you have the necessary apps configured, using the feature is surprisingly easy, here’s how to do it:

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If you want to delete all music from an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, you can handle the entire music removal process directly on the iOS device itself, you don’t need to sync to iTunes or do anything fancy. Do be warned however, this deletes every single song and album from the Music app and from the device, so be absolutely certain you want to do this!

So you definitely want to remove all music from an iOS device? That’s what we’ll show you how to do, it’s a few settings deep to prevent accidental access and removal of songs, but it’s easy to do in just a few steps.

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If you read the OS X Mountain Lion system requirements and got discouraged that the next version of OS X won’t support your computer, don’t give up hope for that old Mac quite yet!

A crafty MacRumors Forums member has managed to get OS X Mountain Lion Developer Preview working on an officially unsupported mid-2007 white MacBook, a model with the unsupported Intel GMA 950 GPU, 2GHz Core 2 Duo CPU, and just 1GB of RAM. Not only does OS X 10.8 run on the old MacBook, it reportedly works very well and with full graphics acceleration.
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This weeks Mac setup comes to us from Ben, a graphic and motion designer from Italy who spends his spare time composing music. The hardware he uses for these pursuits includes:

• iMac 21.5″
• Apple Wireless Keyboard
• Magic Mouse
• M-Audio KeyStudio 49 (Keyboard)
• AKG – K66 headphones
• Logitech speakers

Great Mac setup Ben, thanks for sending this in!

Submit pictures of your own Apple & Mac setups to osxdailycom@gmail.com – include some details on the hardware and what you use it for.

OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion will be offered exclusively through the App Store, familiar territory for Apple since OS X Lion was provided the same way. Thankfully it’s still possible to create a bootable OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion installer from any USB drive, be it a flash key or external hard drive.

By creating a bootable install drive, you can perform clean OS X 10.8 installs, install it on separate partitions, and install OS X Mountain Lion on Macs that don’t have internet connections. We’ll walk through the process here, but don’t forget to check OS X 10.8 system requirements for the destination Mac before beginning.

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Growth of iOS, the mobile operating system that powers iPhones, iPads, iPod touch, and Apple TV, is exploding. To put iOS’s success into some context, Asymco crafted the above chart to demonstrate the growth curve relative to years of Apple products on the market. The most staggering observation? Apple sold 156 million iOS devices last year alone, that is over 30 million more units shipped than all 28 years of the Macs existence, where it has sold 122 million computers. Overall, the iOS platform totals over 316 million devices sold in a few short years.

Look to iOS to Understand Mac OS X
If you’re wondering why Apple has been pushing the Mac platform to more closely resemble iOS with the release of OS X Lion and OS X Mountain Lion, this is it. The simplicity, familiarity, and success of iOS is too much to resist. PC’s, and Macs too for that matter, are indeed becoming the “trucks” that Steve Jobs predicted several years ago at D8 2010, becoming greatly outnumbered by the “cars” (in this case, iOS devices). Jobs’ now famous quote from that conversation:

“When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks, because that’s what you needed on the farm. But as vehicles started to be used in the urban centers, cars got more popular. Innovations like automatic transmission and power steering and things that you didn’t care about in a truck as much started to become paramount in cars. … PCs are going to be like trucks. They’re still going to be around, they’re still going to have a lot of value, but they’re going to be used by one out of X people. … I think that we’re embarked on that. Is the next step the iPad? Who knows? Will it happen next year or five years from now or seven years from now? Who knows? But I think we’re headed in that direction.”

The only thing Jobs’ was wrong about was how soon it would happen. As Asymco notes, it only took four years for iOS to overtake OS X.

Simplicity is the Future
None of this means the Mac is dead or dying though, in fact Mac sales are more impressive than ever before, but it does signify the changing roll of computers and how we define a PC. It makes us question who needs what hardware, and for what purpose. Frankly, for many users an iPad – or iPhone – is more than adequate to handle the routine tasks of daily technical life, be it reading or sending emails to browsing the web and listening to music. The Mac (and PC) will certainly still be around for those required to perform more complex tasks, but that market is undoubtedly smaller, and this has already been proven by the runaway success of iOS. As a result, traditional desktop operating systems are evolving towards simplicity. The Mac and PC are ultimately over-engineered and too powerful for the average users technical needs, this helps to explain Apple’s OS X strategy and Microsofts Windows 8 concepts, the power and underlying complexity is still there, but the experience is becoming simpler.

As DaringFireball noted when linking to the Asymco chart, “The lesson: simplicity sells.” If you have any doubts about this or where the industry is going, just look at that chart.

Flickr has an endless supply of beautiful photos that make for fantastic automatically updating image screen savers in Mac OS X.

All you need is a good Flickr stream and you can easily create a new screen saver from it for your Mac.

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Apple TV owners have an extra incentive to upgrade their Macs to the latest versions of OS X; AirPlay Mirroring. With AirPlay Mirroring, you can stream the Mac desktop and whatever application is on screen to an HDTV wirelessly through the Apple TV, making it easier than ever to watch videos from a Mac or play games on a much larger TV screen from a couch.

This is an awesome feature that became supported on the Mac with newer versions of OS X, here is exactly what you’ll need to use it:
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